Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Dahalokely Tokana

Hail comrades!

Today's post is not about Edmontosaurus. I lied. Sorry Edmontosaurus fans. You'll just have to do whatever it is Edmontosaurus fans do elsewhere. Today's post is about Dahalokely Tokana, a relatively new theropod from Madagascar.Dahalokely's name means "Lonely Bandit," so it probably would've prowled the Madagascarian west, stealing all the other dinosaurs' cows and horses and holding up dinosaur banks. Dahalokely Tokana was named from a few vertebrae and fragmentary rib pieces. These bits were enough to identify it as an abelisaurid. Abelisaurids were the apex predators of the southern continents, and the family included such notable members as Carnotaurus. They were known for having slightly longer fore arms than their distant tyrannosaur cousins and shorter more blunt snouts, whether their vocal cords were capable of partaking in soulful campfire songs is still unknown. Dahalokely was 3.5m long and lived 90 million years ago (midish lateish Cretaceous), 2 million years before Madagascar split from Africa and became its own whackily diverse island. When Madagascar did eventually split, it carried Dahalokely's descendants with it and they diverged from the species of the main land into their own. #allopatricspeciation. Due to the fragmentary nature of Dahalokely's fossil, not much is known about it, but seeing as it is the only currently known dinosaur of its kind living in the area at the time, it was probably the top predator and as such was a fast runner with a ferocious bite.